It is easy to disregard veganism as just a rather extreme lifestyle choice but in fact these principles that make up veganism are in aggressive opposition to foundational Christian doctrines. They are also increasingly seeping into mainstream thought via the media, especially in areas like conservation and agriculture.
These principles include the following:
- Humans have no special status. Veganism explicitly places the same value on animal life as human life. Human beings are just another animal. Some vegans even go so far as to compare society's use of animals for food to the Holocaust, and human ownership of animals to pre-Abolition slavery. (Ironically, however, vegans actually place humans on a different level from other animals, as other animals feel no compunction in killing and eating one another, and by expecting humans to behave in ways completely counter to natural selection, a theory which has done so much to shape veganism.)
- Rejection of the so-called 'commodification' of animals, so vegans will not, for example, keep animals captive or use for milk production, clothing, riding/ploughing, keeping pets or taking any medicines that might have been tested on animals.
- Veganism asserts that meat eating is immoral and veganism is therefore a moral obligation. One prominent exponent of this position is the philosopher Peter Singer, who at the same time advocates full term abortion and even infanticide at the choice of mothers.
Christianity, on the other hand asserts that:
- Human beings are distinct from the rest of creation because they possesses a soul and are created in the image of God.
- God gave mankind special status as steward of his creation: Man may have abused this role at times but God still regards him as the pinnacle of his creation and as the steward of the rest of creation.
- God gave all living creatures to human beings for them to use including as food and for sacrificial purposes.
- The killing of other life for food and sacrifices can be viewed as a shocking necessity meant to bring home to human beings the seriousness of their sin. God determined to provide the animals to act as these substitutes and symbols 'before the foundation of the earth'. They were provided to point forward to the final true sacrifice, that of his son Jesus Christ who offered himself 'for the sin of the whole world'.
- To say that it is wrong to kill animals therefore a) denies God the right to utilise things he created as he chooses, b) challenges the rightness of God in giving them to people for that purpose and c) therefore attacks substitutionary atonement for sin which is the heart of the gospel.
Veganism is the combined result of pursuing Darwinism to its logical conclusion and attempts to provide an ethical framework for life which specifically excludes any reference to any being outside the physical world. Veganism and humanism therefore go hand in hand. Most Western vegans have explicitly rejected belief in God although some follow atheistic forms of Buddhism. Some proponents of veganism, like Peter Singer, are among the most obnoxious and vociferous critics of Christianity.It can be seen from this that veganism is not a neutral lifestyle choice but an ideology which is on a collision course with Christianity.
We can see from this that, although it is quite possible for a Christian to adopt a non-meat eating lifestyle, it is not possible to be both a vegan and a Christian. More importantly, we can also see that below a relatively innocuous surface lie a set of ideas which are distinctly anti-Christian, which are increasingly seeping into mainstream thinking and which Christians need to understand - both in order to engage with them in contemporary culture and to guard our own hearts against erosion in confidence in God's providences and principles.
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